Closely watched trains

Duration: 89

Year Published: 1966

Creator: Audio Brandon

Format: 16mm

Color: B&W

Sound: sound

Description: Menzel's first solo-directed film unfolds during World War II in a sleepy rural railway station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The stationmaster is too busy tending his geese and pigeons to be concerned with timetables. Milos, the station's newly-hired clerk and the film's protagonist, witnesses the tirless womanizing of the dispatcher and yearns to lose his virginity. In the film's ironic denouement, Milos' sexual initiation is finally achieved with an attractive resistance fighter, but the tentacles of war curtail his emerging manhood. Winner of an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. (Does not circulate)

Complete Record: Menzel's first solo-directed film unfolds during World War II in a sleepy rural railway station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia. The stationmaster is too busy tending his geese and pigeons to be concerned with timetables. Milos, the station's newly-hired clerk and the film's protagonist, witnesses the tirless womanizing of the dispatcher and yearns to lose his virginity. In the film's ironic denouement, Milos' sexual initiation is finally achieved with an attractive resistance fighter, but the tentacles of war curtail his emerging manhood. Winner of an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. (Does not circulate)